Catherine Rampell: “The swamp that desperately needs draining isn’t in Washington, D.C. It’s in state capitals around the country, where undemocratic, anti-majoritarian officials are seizing rights from voters and flagrantly thwarting the will of the people.”

“The traditional sources of accountability that nudged or forced elected officials to be responsive to their constituents have weakened. The result is greater job security for state officials practicing minority rule — and worse outcomes for voters.”

“The Transportation Department’s inspector general asked the Justice Department in December to consider a criminal investigation into what it said was Elaine Chao’s misuse of her office as transportation secretary in the Trump administration to help promote her family’s shipping business, which is run by her sister and has extensive business ties with China,” the New York Times reports.

“The inspector general said the Justice Department’s criminal and public integrity divisions both declined to take up the matter in the closing weeks of the Trump administration, even after the inspector general found repeated examples of Ms. Chao using her staff and her office to help benefit her family and their business operations and revealed that staff members at the agency had raised ethics concerns.”

“Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of corruption and influence peddling,” Politico reports.

“Sarkozy, who served as president from 2007 to 2012, was accused of having offered a judge a plum job in exchange for confidential information related to another trial he was facing.”

Associated Press: “This is the first time in France’s modern history that a former president has been convicted of corruption.”

“Late last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) fired multiple senior aides who accused him of accepting a bribe. A court filing reveals for the first time what four of those aides believe Paxton received in exchange for helping a donor with his business affairs,” the Texas Tribune reports.

“An updated version of a lawsuit filed by the four whistleblowers claims that Austin real estate developer Nate Paul helped Paxton remodel his house and gave a job to a woman with whom Paxton allegedly had an affair.”

“In return, the aides allege, Paxton used his office to help Paul’s business interests, investigate Paul’s adversaries and help settle a lawsuit.”

FBI agents early Friday raided the homes and offices of several Tennessee state Republican lawmakers, the Tennessean reports.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that the raid included the home of disgraced former House Speaker Glen Casada (R).

Tim Naftali: “Will Trump be the first to test the constitutionality of a self-pardon, just as he has tested the limits of so many other constraints on presidential power? Precedent has never mattered to him. He has reportedly been asking aides about the possibility of a self-pardon since 2017. Unlike Nixon, he can’t even hope for a pardon from his immediate successor. But neither can he count on the Supreme Court to uphold a self-pardon; in summarily dismissing Trump’s effort to overturn the election, the justices reminded him that a president should not count on the support of his appointees.”

“The Framers couldn’t imagine a Congress failing to impeach and remove a corrupt president. Chief Justice Taft couldn’t imagine a president abusing the pardon power, and he couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which a president would pardon himself. Mary Lawton couldn’t imagine that the Constitution would allow a president to be the judge in his own case.”

“But in the final days of the presidency of Donald Trump, very little seems unimaginable anymore.”

Mother Jones has an interesting footnote to Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy pleading guilty to charges that he conspired to illegally lobby the Trump administration.

“He faces up to five years in prison in part because of what in retrospect seems to have been a dumb mistake. Broidy voluntarily gave the FBI emails from his and his wife’s accounts while seeking the bureau’s assistance in pursuing hackers who he claimed had stolen this material and leaked damaging details about his business dealings to the press.”

“According to a just-unsealed ruling issued in June 2018 by Beryl Howell, the chief US District Judge in Washington, DC, nearly 1,400 pages of emails that Broidy provided to the FBI were subsequently used by the bureau in the investigation that led to Broidy’s guilty plea. Following a secretive legal process, Howell ruled that Broidy had surrendered the material to the FBI and after doing that—when the bureau wanted to exploit the documents for an investigation of Broidy himself—could no longer claim the information was covered by attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege.”

“Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, one of President Trump’s longest-serving cabinet members, has been under investigation for most of his tenure in office, according to a report issued by the inspector general of the commerce department,” Forbes reports.

“The report both revealed the investigation and published its findings. It concluded that Ross, who has served as commerce secretary since Trump’s first year in office, violated a federal regulation by failing to avoid the appearance of ethical and legal breaches. The report cleared him on other matters, including whether he lied to federal officials and engaged in insider trading.”

“The FBI is investigating allegations that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) broke the law in using his office to benefit a wealthy donor,” the AP reports.

“Confirmation of the criminal probe marks mounting legal peril for Paxton, who’s denied wrongdoing and refused calls for his resignation since his top deputies reported him to federal authorities at the end of September.”